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I suspect that this is less about blocking YouTube downloaders, and more about blocking those extensions that appear after not un-checking the box on programs downloaded and installed from the internet.

I.e. it's more for the protection of grandma who wants to download a pretty solitaire app than it is for stopping little Johnny downloading his music videos of Miley.

This. Google is not stupid, they know that users that want to install extensions from their disk know how to install Chromium. I'm fine with it if less crap is going to get installed on my parents computer. I'll just install Chromium and everything will stay the same for me.

As a Canadian, here's the thing I don't get about the American "fear" of single-payer health care system : "Oh my god, the paperwork! And the bureaucrats that deny care!"

Now here's how it works for a Canadian : You go see a doctor, you give them your single-payer card and... That's it. There's no additional charges or paperwork to fill out, no administrative useless bullcrap. Heck I got surgery done a few years back and all I had to do was to show up at the hospital on time and show them my little card. No cash needed, no bill, just care.

Plus, patching the software of a million cars isn't the same as using auto-update on Windows. My biggest concern would be an attacker getting in the car, installing a wireless device in the OBD port and controlling it from a distance, especially since you can buy an OBD II Wifi adapter for under 100$ these days.

You could do some really bad things to someone you don't like on the highway...

Good grief, how hard is it to not be paranoid is this day and age? They don't want child porn to show up on their searches so they find a way to flag the images and not display them : that's it. If there comes a time when the technology is used malevolently to suppress political ideas, then you'll be able to bitch about it but going all "tinfoil hat" on it because there might me an hypothetical use which you don't like is just ridiculous.

At the moment, Google uses mostly human beings to review flagged content so if their algorithm makes those reviewers sleep better at night, I'm all for it.

A couple of years ago, they did some kind of "super city elections". Pretty much every city and village of the province had elections held on the same day, most of them using an electronic voting system. It was, I think, the best type available : your ballot wasn't any different then the one we're used to, just white circles on a black background. The difference was that instead of putting it in a box, you'd put it in a scanner first and it would fall in a bin after that. Re-counting, if necessary was pretty straight forward.

It was, however, the last time I saw electronic voting used in the province. Because of electoral law, the electronic ballots were kept at the voting stations until they were closed, the scanners would then upload their results in batch onto the servers of the company that had been chosen to do the counting. It failed miserably, possibly because of the amount of data they had to process at once, most probably because they had a web facing interface where you could go and watch the results coming in live. Most ballot boxes had to be recounted by hand and the results had to be phoned in.

I've heard of many barrels or trucks full of maple syrup having been stolen in the past couple of years. Considering it retails for around 7-8$ per 540ml can (50$ a galon) it's fairly easy to see why it's such a high profile target.